


we are now in the mountains

by bulletville (foxlives)



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 04:51:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5034397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/bulletville
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"No," Boyd says, "I don't believe you saved me, soul or otherwise."</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The bitter future and the hard-won past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are now in the mountains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hardlygolden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardlygolden/gifts).



"You did it," Boyd gasps out, voice breathless and strange, not quite his own. "You really did it." Raylan hasn't heard that voice in twenty years and he hadn't heard it before. He remembers running up toward the sunlight, collapsing in the dust. Boyd's voice, that same voice, saying _raylan—raylan—_ , saying _are we okay?_ Raylan nodding, coughing up coal dust and too scared to speak.

Boyd's coughing blood now, flecked on his lips and pooled at the corner of his mouth. He breathes, wet and ragged. Raylan hasn't heard Boyd scared in twenty years and hadn't heard it in the twenty before, and it makes something rise up in his throat, coal dust still stuck behind his tongue, that this time he's the one to cause it.

"I'm sorry," he says again, and then, it's just the three of them.

*

_She and Raylan had been about what had come before, or hadn't. She'd thought about what would've happened if he hadn't run at nineteen, how maybe she would've held off marrying Bowman and then, in a few years, she and Raylan could've got together and lived happy. Half of her had known it would've never happened, had known Raylan: she remembered what he'd been like that last year in Harlan, driving her around in his pick-up with coal dust in the lines of his knuckles. A hardness in his eyes, and his hands, as they gripped the wheel._

_Then he'd come back, and high on freedom she thought maybe this was a sign. They could play out what had almost been and it would be right this time._

_The past around here is its own being, solid and violent. But it wasn't enough to hold them together, she'd thought at the time. Now she knows it has, just not like she'd thought she wanted: here they are, across from each other in a prison visiting room. Here they are, him chasing her down. Here they are, bright California sunlight falling across their shoulders, so far from home._

*

"How is he?" Ava asks him.

Raylan takes off his jacket slow, turning away from her as he sets it on the chair. "Didn't think you’d care."

She smiles a little, uncertainly. "I thought he'd died in my dinin room," she says. "Guess that's enough to give a girl at least a little interest."

Raylan shrugs, setting his hat on top of the jacket. "He's Boyd," he says vaguely. He breathes in, a secret he doesn't want to tell. "He's goin on about something—God and soul-savin, and such."

"Huh," Ava says. "Never knew him to be religious."

"Oh," Raylan says, looking over at her and half-smiling, "he didn't tell you the one about the mud people?"

"Mud people?"

Raylan just shakes his head.

"Well, I bet he's on enough morphine to put down a horse," Ava says, like she's reassuring him. "I'm sure his head'll clear an' he'll go back to being the same old Boyd."

"Sure," Raylan says, remembers the untapped morphine drip. "I'm sure."

*

_She and Boyd are the future, the past made irrelevant. Stepped beyond. They'll climb up through Harlan, up Clover Hill. They'll buy a house she used to scrub on her hands and knees and her mama before her and they won't be on their knees anymore. They will rise up._

_Now all that's left of that is the bitter future, the bitter what-might-have-been. Things fall apart. Ava doesn't let herself remember what could've been anymore. And anyway, no one leaves Harlan—_

*

"You still think I saved your soul?" Raylan asks, leaning toward him, elbow still planted on the bar. Like a dare. His ring glints gold in the dim bar light, luck worn on his knuckles. He has a mean look on his face and Boyd drinks it in: when he had come back to Kentucky, the suit and the car, for a second Boyd hadn't even recognized him. Like this, he is undoubtedly Raylan Givens, could never be anyone else.

Boyd looks back at him. "You tryin to get a rise outta me, Raylan, it ain't gonna work tonight."

Raylan leans back a little, tips his hat back on his head. He's drunk, drunk the way they used to get when it was the only bulwark between them and ten-hour shifts down in the mines. Boyd wonders if Arlo's death isn't hitting him harder that Raylan would admit to.

"Ain't tryin to get anythin," Raylan tells him. His accent's boiled down thicker than Boyd's heard it since he's been back, back to what it was when they were boys. It occurs to Boyd that he might've missed it.

Boyd glances at him, indulgent. Sips at the half-inch of his drink. "Everyone's tryin to get somethin, Raylan."

"Never could give a straight goddamn answer," Raylan mutters into his glass.

"No," Boyd says, loud and sharp. Raylan looks up at him. "No," Boyd says, trying to temper himself, "I don't believe you saved me, soul or otherwise."

"Hm." Raylan sweeps off his hat, tips it back onto his head and a new angle. "Suppose that's some weight off my chest."

"Well, it's some weight off mine." Raylan looks questioning. "Thinking you've been saved for a purpose weighs heavy on the mind, my friend."

Raylan looks over the bar, at the neon beer signs the light them both up blue and red, unnatural. "I had a thought in that direction," he says slowly, "after the mine fell down on us. Thought maybe it was a sign."

"Well you certainly seemed to heed it," Boyd says.

Raylan squints at him, like he's trying to figure that out. "Anyway," he says after a moment, "it didn't last long. Not the sentimental type, I guess. Or the superstitious."

Boyd's saved from replying—Raylan's saved from his reply—as Ava comes out of the back room. He finishes his drink, sharp and fast.

*

And now it's the after, the end of the story. Raylan on her new front porch, Boyd locked away in Kentucky.

"Seems you got out of Harlan much easier than I did," he says, looking off at the California horizon with a crease in between his eyes. "Perhaps that's tellin me somethin."

"Wasn't easy," she says, smiling at Raylan like she knows more than he ever could. "Pregnant and crawlin across this country one state border at a goddamn time? You think that's easy?"

He nods to her, conceding. There stare out together at the land, unfamiliar under their feet. A different thickness to the air. Nothing at all like Harlan County and maybe that's enough, enough to convince Ava she never wants to go back.

"I never thought it would actually stick," she says, and when Raylan looks at her: "Boyd, in jail. I always thought—"

She stops. Raylan says, "You thought he'd weasel out of it somehow."

"I thought he'd save himself," she trades back, just as fast, and Raylan looks momentarily taken aback before he looks away again.

"He never had a chance," Raylan says, but not cruelly. 

"You did," she says simply.

He shakes his head. "No. Helen saved me," he says simply. He looks back to her again, and his look is softer than she remembers it being. "But you did."

She knows what he means, caught in the short sparse words. In the end she had no one but herself, and in the end, that was enough. She saved herself. Now, in the aftermath, she can be proud of that.

"I guess it's all just luck," she says, "or fate. Somethin bigger than us."

"I guess," Raylan says. They look out west.

**Author's Note:**

> title from a john muir quote that begins, "We are now in the mountains and they are in us. . ."


End file.
